(I've absolutely been punting it lately regarding my weekly blog posts. Surely this'll reflect poorly on my Blogger Hall of Fame application down the road. I'll just make a donation to their non-profit to sweep it under the rug and we'll be good.)
Feels like I've barely touched my cameras since being in Oklahoma the last few months. Not intentionally, but it's been a thing. My RED kit went out on a rental a couple weeks ago and on it's return I spent a couple hours and an unhealthy amount of Clorox wiping off the airborne death I'm hoping didn't come back with it.
"What we're seeing today is different from March and April," [Dr. Deborah] Birx said on CNN's State of the Union. "It is extraordinarily widespread — it's into the rural as equal urban areas." - npr.org
I'd kept it clean while we were in Brooklyn during all this nonsense. Giving it a solid scrub the other day I noticed how much crap and crud had built up. The screws were dry and crusty. There was dust and dirt from God knows when and where. There's some fancy mechanisms involved with the camera hardware that had long seized up, but I was able to get in there with a toothbrush, canned air, and some WD-40 and that nonsense feels good as new. I'm not dumb enough to try and mess with any of the electronic bits, but I did notice the Clorox wipes I'd been using to kill off corona had over time left little bits behind. The beach is great and all, but you never come back without sand where it shouldn't be.
The last few years my stills camera has seemed to morph into something else. The Canon 5D Mark III I'd bought years ago to replace my 7D for video work has nearly the same importance now as my Moleskine notebooks and black pen. I'd for sure like to have something a bit smaller to carry around, but there's about five to seven thousand reasons why I don't at the moment.
Both of my main cameras have done their fair share of work over the years and paid for themselves many times over, but more than that they're a means of practice, experiment, and getting out what I can't say or write. In time those tools will need to be replaced, but the big deal is what they've allowed.
It's incredibly comforting to me just to be holding a camera. A few weeks into lockdown I built out my RED kit and just had it sitting on my desk because it brought back some sense of normalcy.
There's no telling how many rooms I've been in and places I've been to that I'd have not been allowed otherwise. During yesterday's history making Nasa/SpaceX event, the most interesting thing to me in SpaceX's Hawthorne mission control room was the camera operator and his Alexa Amira setup.
No question I've been paying attention to the protests around the country, but I've been hit especially hard knowing how the press has been targeted by local, state, and federal law enforcement. The local TV reporters shot with pepper balls, the dude in Lafayette Square blindsided for a ridiculous photo-op, and the veteran photog covering the Portland protests who got shot through the plastic eye hole of his gas mask after he'd walked away from the demonstration. In his Facebook post following the event, he said,
"In urgent care, the doctor left the room multiple times as the pepper on me caused her to cough uncontrollably. She wore a respirator to stitch my eye."
Oh, and this whole thing concerning Homeland Security Shutting Down ‘Intelligence’ Reports on Journalists is absolutely on par with the rest of the dumpster fire happening at the moment:
“The Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged that its intelligence reporting system, designed to combat terrorism, has instead been misused to target journalists who were reporting on the controversial activities of federal law enforcement officers,” she said in a statement. “It is imperative that D.H.S.’s investigation determines how this happened and ensures it does not happen again.”
But don't mind me. I'll just be here, keeping my gear clean and hoping to use it soon enough to shoot another mayonnaise commercial so I can try and pay bills, make up for the last few months, and keep my family from having to cash in my life insurance policy while we're living through whatever this is.